Artistic expression can be conveyed in any one of several mediums including music. Musical instruments provide the tools with which to express musicality. Drums or percussions instruments in general are one such tool.
Drum structure and design has remained consistent over several generations. This consistent structure and design has preserved the sound quality that initial incarnations of the instrument produced. While standard and commonplace today, the sound produced by drums constructed according to the conventional structure and design is one that is deadened or muted. This is because of structural features that are integrated into the drum shell that impede the shell's ability to resonate and produce a full and rich sound.
FIG. 1 illustrates drum structure and design common in the prior art. The drum is composed of a pair of drum hoops or rims, a shell, a set of lugs, and a corresponding set of lug holders attached across the side of the drum shell.
The interior of each hoop contains the drumhead. The drumhead is the contact surface that vibrates when stricken during play. For a typical drum, the drumhead on the top side of the drum, sometimes called the batter head, is the part of the drum that a drummer strikes when playing the instrument. The drumhead on the bottom side of the drum provides resonance and is usually thinner than the drumhead on the top side.
Tuning assemblies on the drum hoop can be used to adjust the tension on the drumhead, thereby tuning the drumhead sound and also allowing different drumheads to be coupled to the shell mount. The drum hoop also contains various openings through which the set of lugs can pass through to connect to the corresponding set of lug holders that are attached across the side of the drum shell.
The shell is the body of the drum. It creates much of the sound characteristics of the drum based in part on the resonance of the materials from which the drum shell is constructed. When the drumhead is impacted, the drumhead vibrates. When the drum hoop is tightly coupled to the drum shell using the lug fastening system, the vibrations channel from the drumhead to the containing hoop and are dispersed across the shell. These vibrations then cause the drum shell to resonate which, in turn, produces some of the drum's sound characteristics. Often, the drum shell includes a small hole referred to as the vent hole. The vent hole allows air to escape when the drum is struck, which in turn improves the resonance of the drum.
However, conventional drum structure and design as shown by FIG. 1 impedes this resonance. This is due to the attachment of the lug holders 110 across the drum shell. Specifically, when the lugs are placed into the lug holders and tightened in order to couple the drum hoop to the shell, a force is exerted on the lug holders based on how tightly the lugs are tightened. The force is then borne onto the drum shell along the points at which the lug holders are connected to the shell. This force pulls the drum shell in at least one direction, preventing the drum shell from fully resonating in the opposite direction(s), and thereby deadening or muting the overall sound produced by the drum.
Conventional drum structure and design further hinders the sound that can be produced by the drum by limiting the current manufacturing and production of the drum shell to dense materials such as metal (e.g., steel or brass), wood (e.g., birch, maple, oak, etc.), and acrylic as some examples, to thicker construction, or some combination of both. The density of the drum shell material and thickness of the drum shell are needed to prevent the drum shell from warping or breaking when absorbing and counteracting the forces imposed by the tensioning of the lugs from the drum hoop to the lug holders attached along the side of the drum shell. This results in a lot of force on the drum shell. It is for this reason that some shells are manufactured with a thickness of up to 20 millimeters. In these instances, more energy is needed to induce resonance from such shells. Also, the density and thickness causes the drum shell to vibrate at a higher intrinsic frequency. Accordingly, the sound profile produced by the drum is defined and limited to the resonate characteristics that these dense or thicker materials provide. The full potential spectrum of a drum shell's sound is unattainable unless a drum shell of reduced thickness or less dense materials are used in the drum shell composition and the drum shell is allowed to resonate freely. Both of these attributes would require less sound energy from a stricken drumhead to generate resonation from a drum shell. Thus, this would provide a drum a more efficient resonating sound profile.
In an attempt to remedy some of these shortcomings, alternative drum designs have been proposed. One such alternative design is provided in U.S. Pat. No. 5,410,938. The provided design frees the resonance of the drum shell by use of tension rods that span from the top side drum hoop (i.e., batter side) to the bottom side drum hoop and by coupling the rod holders to the hoops instead of the drum shell. This design improves the potential resonate characteristics of the drum shell, but does so by imposing other tradeoffs in the sound quality of the drum. Specifically, this design produces a distorted and impure sound because vibrations from the drumhead disburse not only across the drum shell but also into each of the tension rods. Consequently, the tension rods absorb vibrations each time the drumhead is struck causing the tension rods to produce additional undesired sounds (i.e., rattling) along with the expected drum sound. These undesired sounds are the result of a failure to isolate the mounting or tuning mechanisms (i.e., tension rods and rod holders) from the sound producing elements of the drum (i.e., drumhead and shell).
Accordingly, there is a need for a new drum structure and design that provides pure and unimpeded sound by allowing the drum shell to resonate freely without distortion or dampening from mounting or tuning mechanisms attached across the side of the drum shell. In other words, there is a need for a new drum structure and design wherein the supporting framework couples together the sound producing elements of the drum in a manner that shields the sound energy emanating from the sound producing elements from the supporting framework. By addressing these needs, one can produce a drum with unparalleled sound. Drum design can further improve the sound profile of the drum by addressing the need to reduce the forces that are imposed on the drum shell. In so doing, such a design would allow for shells constructed from thinner materials to be incorporated into the drum construction with the drum shell offering greater resonance and different sound characteristics than their thicker or more dense counterparts.